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Before he reached the top of the Mafia in Canada, Nicolo Rizzuto owned a construction company that won municipal contracts in Montreal.

The late patriarch of one of the world’s most powerful Mafia clans was a municipal contractor 50 years before the authorities decided to investigate whether organized crime had a hold on the construction industry and public contracts in the province, The Gazette has discovered through an examination of municipal archives, and business and real-estate records from half a century ago.

Rizzuto’s resumé included in his company’s bidding documents at the time claims he even participated in the construction of Montreal’s cherished Expo 67, the Universal and International Exposition of 1967 that put the city on the world map.

The company, Grand Royal Asphalt Paving, also landscaped, paved and laid sewers and pipes in a dozen public parks in Montreal under four municipal contracts between 1963 and 1966 that The Gazette discovered in the city’s archives. The search also turned up contracts that Rizzuto’s company bid on and lost, but a tally would require searching every municipal contract the city awarded during those years.

Grand Royal Asphalt Paving’s resumé also vaunted projects for the municipalities of Laval, Pierrefonds and St-Léonard and “miscellaneous work” for Ville de Jacques-Cartier, a town that was known as one of the most corrupt municipalities on the South Shore at the time and is today absorbed into Longueuil.

In fact, municipal, real-estate and business records trace Rizzuto’s career in the construction sector starting almost immediately after he arrived in Canada from Sicily in the 1950s to be the standard-bearer of his father-in-law’s Sicilian Mafia clan, and ebbing around the time that he reportedly withdrew to Venezuela during a war with Calabrian rival Paolo Violi in the 1970s. Rizzuto returned to Montreal and seized control of the underworld after the 1978 assassination of Violi, who had succeeded Montreal Mob boss Vic Cotroni.

Rizzuto was killed by a sniper’s bullet while at home in Ahuntsic-Cartierville borough at age 86 in 2010. His son, Vito, who succeeded his father at the helm of the crime family, died of natural causes at age 67 in late December.

THE EARLY YEARS

Nicolo Rizzuto, his wife, son Vito and a daughter arrived in Montreal from Sicily just as Nicolo turned 30 in 1954.

Back in his village of Cattolica Eraclea, Nicolo Rizzuto had married the daughter of the local Mafia boss, Antonio Manno.

What has been reported until now of Rizzuto’s first years in Montreal concerns his rapid insertion into the Sicilian faction of the Cotroni clan controlling Mafia activities in the city at the time.

He arrived during a period when otherwise local competing Sicilian and Calabrian factions of the Mafia were working together after the Bonanno family of New York tasked a Sicilian crew led by Luigi Greco and a Calabrian crew led by Cotroni to jointly run drug-trafficking and racketeering in Montreal under the leadership of Cotroni, authors Lee Lamothe and Adrian Humphreys have detailed in their book, The Sixth Family.

“Rizzuto was a soldier of Luigi Greco,” retired journalist André Cédilot, who co-authored Mafia Inc., said of Rizzuto’s early days in the city. But in the early 1970s, Greco died in an accidental fire and Cotroni, ill with cancer, passed the reins to his sidekick, Violi.

Rizzuto, who had an independent streak, had formed his own crew within the Cotroni organization during his early years in Montreal with the help of his extended family, Cédilot said. Rizzuto also hooked up with the Caruanas and Cuntreras, who were based in Montreal before relocating to Venezuela and who went on to build an international drug-smuggling and money-laundering empire, he said. Sicilian-Calabrian peace in the clan would not last.

The Rizzuto name surfaced in various police reports, but it would be years before the authorities seemed to catch up to the family’s expanding importance. The province’s Commission d’enquête sur le crime organisé (CECO) in the 1970s described an escalating war between Nicolo Rizzuto and the leaders of the clan in muted terms, though a police witness testified at the commission in 1975 that Nicolo Rizzuto aspired to control the Mafia in Quebec. But it was Cotroni and Violi who were targeted by the commission.

During all this time, various public records consulted by The Gazette show that Rizzuto used the construction industry as a legitimate face, starting with a 1956 sales deed for a De Lorimier Ave. four-plex he purchased which listed his occupation as “cement contractor.”

Rizzuto went on to set up five companies related to construction with various partners — some of them notorious names in the underworld — between 1962 and 1972. The companies’ histories are documented in business records and the Gazette Officielle du Québec, the official publication of provincial government regulations and notices.

For example, Domenico Manno, Rizzuto’s brother-in-law, was a business partner in four of the firms. He was later imprisoned for his role in Violi’s 1978 slaying. He was released from a federal prison in the U.S. in December 2012 after serving 14 years on a drug-trafficking sentence.

Rizzuto’s companies seemed to run the gamut of work related to the construction field, including landscaping, paving, materials supply, housing construction, electrical work and trucking. The second-to-last of them to be registered, Franco Electric Inc., was dissolved by the government for not filing an annual return during the three years it existed. Rizzuto, Manno and Rizzuto’s half-brother Liborio Milioto had incorporated that one in 1966 with Léonide Payant, the only electrician in the group.

Manno and Rizzuto also registered D.M. Transport, a trucking company, in 1972 with Joseph LoPresti, a representative in Canada of the Bonanno crime family of New York who was murdered in 1992.

A housing construction firm, C.R.I.S. Construction Inc., incorporated in 1964 by Rizzuto and three partners, bought and sold real-estate around Montreal during its existence between 1964 and 1967. Rizzuto and his partners in the firm also bought a property together on auction from the city of Montreal, real-estate records show.

But it appears that Grand Royal Asphalt Paving served as Rizzuto’s only route into the world of government contracts.

The earliest trace of the company is a certificate accompanying its winning bid on a city parks contract in 1963. The certificate shows Vincenzo Cammalleri registered the company in 1962 under the name Grand Royal Asphalt Reg’d. The company was headquartered in Rizzuto’s own unit of his four-plex. Yet it was Rizzuto, Manno and a third man, Liborio Iacono, who incorporated the company as Grand Royal Asphalt Paving Inc. in 1965.

Cammalleri’s name showed up again on the 1963 incorporation documents for Montor Landscape & Construction Inc., which listed its activities as dealing in “stone, lime, cement, sand, ores, minerals and construction materials of all kinds.” Cammalleri and Rizzuto set up the company with a third man, Charles Campo.

Meanwhile, Iacono was also involved with Rizzuto in incorporating C.R.I.S. Construction, along with Giovanni Battista Cuffaro. Iacono and Cuffaro are referred to as real-estate agents in some property sale deeds. Rizzuto’s third partner in C.R.I.S. Construction, and presumably the “S” in the name, was Aubrey Smofsky.

Cédilot said he was aware that Rizzuto, who had declared on his 1954 immigration papers that he was a farmer, had formed Grand Royal Paving Asphalt with Manno. But Cédilot said information available till now only indicated the one company’s existence, and that it worked on private residential walkways — not on public contracts funded by taxpayers.

BID-RIGGING GOES BACK MORE THAN 50 YEARS

Testimony at the Charbonneau Commission over the past 16 months has presented the phenomenon of a cartel of companies rigging the outcome of public tender bids and paying a cut of their inflated contract prices to political organizers and the Mafia as something that took hold in the mid-2000s.

Now it appears Nicolo Rizzuto himself was part of the foundation, so to speak, more than half a century ago.

In fact, an examination of the contracts Grand Royal Asphalt Paving Inc. and Grand Royal Asphalt Reg’d. won in the city of Montreal reveals parallels with the avowals of present-day collusion and contract

Witnesses have testified that a restrained group of bidders controlled contracts in the past decade, and in specific areas of construction, such as sidewalks or sewers. Some of the entrepreneurs hailed from the same village in Sicily as Rizzuto, they’ve said. Witnesses have also testified about winning bidders subcontracting work to their supposed rivals, a pattern that can indicate collusion. They’ve also testified about contractors having controlled contracts in off-island municipalities as well as Montreal.

Casting the spotlight back on 50 years ago, only a small group of firms competed with Rizzuto’s company on a stream of municipal parks contracts. Grand Royal’s apparent rivals had contracts in municipalities on the South Shore and North Shore as well as Montreal, their resumés show. And the companies got some of that work through subcontracting, their resumés and civil service reports indicate. In fact, a search of city archives found no contracts awarded to Rizzuto’s firm for Expo 67, which suggests his company may have subcontracted the work by another contractor.

Some of the supposed rivals also had links to each other. For example, Rizzuto personally borrowed $1,777.50 in 1960 from Miron Construction Limitée, a rival bidder on two parks contracts, in 1964 and 1966. The loan was registered on Rizzuto’s De Lorimier four-plex, a real-estate record shows. And the winner on the 1964 contract, to redo Notre-Dame-de-Grâce Park, was Three Star Paving Reg’d. which was headquartered at a 2nd Ave. St-Michel building that company owner Nicholas Morello’s wife sold to Manno, Rizzuto’s partner and brother-in-law, and another buyer, in 1965, real-estate records show.

“It sounds to me like the executive committee, for whatever reason, had a fondness for (Grand Royal),” Courtenay Thompson, a procurement consultant and forensic accountant in Dallas, Tex., said when the scenarios were described to him. Thompson teaches a course on construction fraud.

A document in the file of one of the contracts that Grand Royal Asphalt Paving won notes the executive committee’s administrative secretary receiving a sealed bid a day after the deadline. The bidder is not identified. Nevertheless, the executive committee passed a resolution going against the city’s contract-awarding rules to send the late bid to the public works department, which was evaluating the offers.

PIZZO MONEY STUFFED INTO HIS SOCKS

The last glimpse most Montrealers were offered of Nicolo Rizzuto came from secret police surveillance video made in the mid-2000s, when he was in his 80s. In it, the patriarch is seen stuffing a wad of rolled-up cash into his sock in the backroom of a Mafia hangout in Montreal.

The video was made during Project Colisée, an RCMP-led investigation against the Mafia that in 2006 culminated in mass arrests, including that of Nicolo Rizzuto.

The footage and other surveillance video showed entrepreneurs whose construction companies have split hundreds of millions of dollars in municipal contracts handing over cash — or ‘pizzo’ — to Mafia leaders. It was shown to the public for the first time at the Charbonneau Commission in 2012 over the RCMP’s attempt to block its release. Project Colisée investigators had been interested in the Mafia’s involvement in drug-trafficking and racketeering, and had apparently ignored the construction angle.

Project Colisée and the Charbonneau Commission have depicted Nicolo Rizzuto’s role in the construction industry as merely being on the receiving end of the Mafia’s share of kickbacks from rigged and overinflated public contracts.

Yet just as Rizzuto’s role in the underworld was underestimated in official accounts decades ago, it appears his role in the underside of the construction industry and public contracts that’s now being exposed has been understated.

As a result, the details now revealing Rizzuto’s first-hand involvement in municipal public tenders as a contractor 50 years ago raise new questions.

Among them is just how long has organized crime been rigging public construction contracts in Quebec?

Consequently, just how much has the public been robbed through collusion over the years?

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